Arduino use is exploding, thanks to its huge community

One of the best decisions we made was basing our autopilot system on Arduino (credit goes to Jordi for spotting its potential so early and selling me on it). The engineers all sniffed at it, complaining that it was just an 8-bit processor running at 16Mhz and could never compete with 32-bit ARM processors running at 70Mhz and faster. But what Jordi spotted was something more: the Atmel chips are RISC processors and very effecient, an autopilot is not actually a very computationally intensive task, and most importantly, it's not about "feeds and speeds", it's about community, which Arduino attracts by being cheap, open and very easy to use.

Arduino has won the community competition hands down. The chart above is from the latest status post, and it shows more than 750,000 monthly vistors to the website and nearly 5 million monthly page views. These figures continue to grow at 100% per year.

Community brings tens of thousands of smart people around a platform, and many hands make light work. The amount of code and libraries out there that can be used for free are staggering and there's little need to reinvent the wheel. What basing the ArduPilot line on Arduino has meant is that we're not just using a great technology platform; we're part of a movement. That means not just great tools and thousands of available developers, but also a "cool factor", that really helps with marketing and adoption. In short, the success of the Arduino revolution is thrilling to watch, not least because it means we've hitched our wagon to the right horse!

bcr: yes, that was exactly what we heard from engineers three years ago. We ignored them and are glad we did. Autopilot teams that decided to go with "superior hardware"--ARM, Propeller, Gumstix, PIC32 and the like--had to deal with complex toolchains and relatively small pools of qualified developers, which raised the barrier to entry. Many succeeded anyway due to a few brilliant people at the core (Paparazzi and the UAV DevBoard, for example), but still tend to have smaller dev teams. Others have stalled out completely.

Note that you can use Arduino without having to use their simple IDE. The APM dev team mostly uses Eclipse and other pro-quality dev tools, and most of the code is C++, not C. But it's all still Arduino-compatible, so even newcomers can work with it in the basic Arduino framework.

That said, Arduino is now extending to ARM and we are, too, thanks to the work of Roberto Navoni and others. But because we started with an easy-to-use computing platform that was more capable that it looked at first glance, we feel we were able to get critical mass easier and sooner, which will help us navigate the more complex migration to 32 bits and RTOSs with a lot of momentum achieved already.

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Developer

John Arne Birkeland April 6, 2011 at 12:21am

The 8bit AVR is good enough and easy to use. But I would like to see a Arduino priced IMU with true EKF filtering, and that sadly is to much to handle for the 16mhz AVR.
T3

Krzysztof Bosak April 5, 2011 at 8:11pm

Exactly this is why I was amazed abotu some other autopilot claiming 140MIPS? then extra 140 MIPS for another processor just fo rthe IMU? this is something like 280.

AVR 16MHz is around 14-15.5 MIPS I estimate. So you can have as many MIPS as you want. You can have also MS Word opened on quad core 4GHz machine - the programmers become careless so easily, no matter how much you have, any processing power can be wasted easily.

Space shuttle is maybe 8x motorola 68000. But with less redundance, you could fly space shuttle on 2-3 atmegas.

1 atmega should be enough for anything less than cruise missile, if you got Engineers.

Most autopilots are RABBIT3000 which is only overmegahertzed Zilog80 with extra peripherals.
bcr April 5, 2011 at 7:24pm

Fair enough and well said. I do think the move to ARM will have many advantages.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson April 5, 2011 at 7:14pm

bcr: yes, that was exactly what we heard from engineers three years ago. We ignored them and are glad we did. Autopilot teams that decided to go with "superior hardware"--ARM, Propeller, Gumstix, PIC32 and the like--had to deal with complex toolchains and relatively small pools of qualified developers, which raised the barrier to entry. Many succeeded anyway due to a few brilliant people at the core (Paparazzi and the UAV DevBoard, for example), but still tend to have smaller dev teams. Others have stalled out completely.

Note that you can use Arduino without having to use their simple IDE. The APM dev team mostly uses Eclipse and other pro-quality dev tools, and most of the code is C++, not C. But it's all still Arduino-compatible, so even newcomers can work with it in the basic Arduino framework.

That said, Arduino is now extending to ARM and we are, too, thanks to the work of Roberto Navoni and others. But because we started with an easy-to-use computing platform that was more capable that it looked at first glance, we feel we were able to get critical mass easier and sooner, which will help us navigate the more complex migration to 32 bits and RTOSs with a lot of momentum achieved already.
bcr April 5, 2011 at 6:56pm

Popularity alone doesn't make something good. Once you're past the learning curve, the ARM MCUs are far superior to AVR8.
I.S. April 5, 2011 at 2:03pm

Happy to see the trend going sky high on that chart, and agree on all points you mentioned and glad you noticed the potential so we can enjoy APM today.

However, I would like to see Arduino also offering more powerful platforms (as ARM) as mainstream,

not just as niche solution as Maple and similar.
Moderator

John Church April 5, 2011 at 1:05pm

Visionaries... Where would we be without them? Realizing potential and latching on to build bigger and better things is absolutely the way to go, and this community is masterful at that for sure! There are plenty who scoff at Arduino, but I bet I have more time on my home-brew gadgets than most in-the-box home engineers! :) (not to downplay those guys, but you know who you are, and you can attest... ;) )

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